The Hr Business-Partner Model: Past Learnings and Future Challenges

...

It would allow the HR specialists being more strategic contributors (Swift, No Date).

This would enable the HR specialists to select and implement much easier HR practices (Swift, No Date). Practices that would be more suitable to developing the business strategy

Business partners and line managers could work together in long term employees’ talent management (Swift, No Date).

4. The use of centralised shared service centres

Shared service centres are single units that manage all routine transactional services through an organisation such as payroll, recruitment and absence monitoring (Swift, No Date). There are generally three key reasons, or drivers, behind the introduction of shared services centres - cost, quality and organisational change (Swift, No Date). In order to carry out this transition development in technology is required, such as the introduction of intranet and employee self-service; this is the key to the implementation of such centres (Swift, No Date).

It is clear that the principle driver for the introduction of a shared service centre for The Snow Mountain Group is organisational change – Other drivers (see SWOT analysis)

The Snow Mountain Group is a large organisation with over 25 landmark hotels across different cities and a number of properties in ski and beach resorts in different countries. Using a centralised service could help the organisation to be more effective in its overall administration across the entire organisation, the purpose being to free up time for in-house staff to focus on strategy work.

The company needs to cope with a very seasonal demand, which is a challenge for the organisation in terms of managing staff recruitment. Due to a failure in maintaining adequate staffing levels, employees that stay are being overworked and this is leading to huge staff turnover. A centralised shared service centre can help to ease this problem by speeding up the recruitment process.

The development of shared service centres in The Snow Mountain Hotel could bring both benefits and drawbacks, the benefits being:

The lowering of costs by avoiding repetition of effort (Akkiraju, Nayak & Goodwin, 2009). Effectively, the same task would not be repeated in each hotel, leading to cost reductions. This also applies to the recruitment costs which are high in most organisations.

Greater HR focus on strategy (CIPD, 2012). The centralisation of the administrative day-to-day routines will free up more time for in-house staff to focus on strategy work.

Economies of scale for investment (Swift, No Date). By having common buying power from shared services the organisation could have high discount in services such as training and development.

However, there is evidence that suggests Shared Service Centres also bring drawbacks to the organisation, including:

Reduced career opportunities for HR staff (Cooke, 2006). In a Centralised Service HR staff focus on the specific service that they provide making it more difficult to get expertise across other business areas, this could reduce career progression opportunities.

Loss of Face-to-Face contact (Cooke, 2006). If an employee has a personal problem or issue, they will not have a direct contact to discuss their problem, as they would have to phone HR at the shared service centre, this leads to issues going unsaid.

Line managers work intensification (Cooke, 2006). Setting up Shared Service Centres means the delegation of some aspects from the HR occupation to the line manager which leads to an increase in the work load for them.

5. Devolution of HR responsibilities to the line managers

The large emphasis the Business Partner Model is having on the organisation, where HR is focussed in supporting the organisation strategy, is influencing the increase and change to the line manger functions (Whittaker & Marchington, 2003) This approach allows the Business partner and the line managers to work together in finding and developing solutions to HR issues.

Arguably, the purpose of the devolution of responsibilities to the line manager is to return HR responsibilities to those directly responsible for managing the staff that work for the organisation in the front line (Carbery & Cross, 2013). It is believed that line managers are best placed to deliver HR practice to those with most direct customer contact and other service providers.

Nevertheless, there are claims that good HRM cannot be delivered by line managers because their responsibility is primarily producing outcomes and giving a service (Whittaker & Marchington, 2003) This is supported in the Snow Mountain hotel by line managers who have stated "I am wasting so much of my time dealing with staff issues and problems, I am not a HR manager", backed up by the GM who stated "I want my line managers to focus on running the business and making profits".

Devolution of HR responsibilities to the Line Manger can bring advantages to an organisation; from the Snow Mountain Hotel perspective the devolution of responsibilities would bring the following benefits:

Closer to work place issues (Whittaker & Marchington, 2003). As Line Managers work in the front line alongside their employees, it should be easier for them to see what is affecting the employees such as the work overload in the peak season, or boredom in the off season.

Understand the business at ground level (Whittaker & Marchington, 2003). Line managers are in permanent contact with customers and most aware of their needs and wants, if there is a change that affect the organisation such as the customer increase in the Snow Village or the employee turnover, line managers would react faster to these changes.

Nevertheless, the devolution of HR responsibilities to Line Managers could also bring disadvantages to the Hotel, such as:

Tensions between Line Managers and HR practitioners (Carbery & Cross, 2013). As is seen in the Hotel, the Line Mangers’ attitude towards taking on more responsibilities for HR work has been negative.

Lack of skills and competencies (Whittaker & Marchington, 2003). Line Managers do not always have the necessary experience and attributes to execute HR functions. This is likely why the new HR Director wants to introduce proper training in HR competencies to Line Mangers.

Dalziel & Strange (2007) suggest that to ensure HR and line managers are fully engaged, HR needs to